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Posted on 06/06/2018 12:20:58 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Having enjoyed my 82nd birthday, I am part of a group of about 50 million Americans who are 65 years of age or older.
Those who are 90 or older were in school during the 1930s. My age cohort was in school during the 1940s. Baby boomers approaching their 70s were in school during the 1950s and early ’60s.
Try this question to any one of those 50 million Americans who are 65 or older: Do you recall any discussions about the need to hire armed guards to protect students and teachers against school shootings? Do you remember school policemen patrolling the hallways? How many students were shot to death during the time you were in school?
For me and those other Americans 65 or older, when we were in school, a conversation about hiring armed guards and having police patrol hallways would have been seen as lunacy. There was no reason.
What’s the difference between yesteryear and today?
The logic of the argument for those calling for stricter gun control laws, in the wake of recent school shootings, is that something has happened to guns. Guns have behaved more poorly and become evil. Guns themselves are the problem.
The job for those of us who are 65 or older is to relay the fact that guns were more available and less controlled in years past, when there was far less mayhem. Something else is the problem.
Guns haven’t changed. People have changed. Behavior that is accepted from today’s young people was not accepted yesteryear.
For those of us who are 65 or older, assaults on teachers were not routine as they are in some cities. For example, in Baltimore, an average of four teachers and staff members were assaulted each school day in 2010, and more than 300 school staff members filed workers’ compensation claims in a year because of injuries received through assaults or altercations on the job.
In Philadelphia, 690 teachers were assaulted in 2010, and in a five-year period, 4,000 were. In that city’s schools, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn’t even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year.”
Yale University legal scholar John Lott argues that gun accessibility in our country has never been as restricted as it is now. Lott reports that until the 1960s, New York City public high schools had shooting clubs. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway in the morning and then turned them over to their homeroom teacher or a gym teacher—and that was mainly to keep them centrally stored and out of the way. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice.
Virginia’s rural areas had a long tradition of high school students going hunting in the morning before school, and they sometimes stored their guns in the trunks of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.
During earlier periods, people could simply walk into a hardware store and buy a rifle. Buying a rifle or pistol through a mail-order catalog—such as Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s—was easy. Often, a 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to a boy by his father.
These facts of our history should confront us with a question: With greater accessibility to guns in the past, why wasn’t there the kind of violence we see today, when there is much more restricted access to guns?
There’s another aspect of our response to mayhem. When a murderer uses a bomb, truck, or car to kill people, we don’t blame the bomb, truck, or car. We don’t call for control over the instrument of death. We seem to fully recognize that such objects are inanimate and incapable of acting on their own. We blame the perpetrator.
However, when the murder is done using a gun, we do call for control over the inanimate instrument of death—the gun. I smell a hidden anti-gun agenda.
*PING*
Like I said, YUGE population increases, YUGE increase in firearm ownership (number off guns, not necessarily people owning), death by firearms is so tiny it’s almost invisible. Mine are resting comfortably.
Walter is saying exactly what we all know, but doesn’t get to the reason.
The reason(s) are simple.
First off, people believed in God and assumed there was an eternal penality for killing someone else unjustly.
Second off, violent behavior towards authority was simply not tolerated.
And thirdly, we didn’t have a culture that promoted violence as if it has no consequences. People didn’t grow up playing hyper violent video games, or watching tv and movies that conditioned them to accept such behavior as normal.
Bingo. If people were civilized, citizens having guns wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, we’re now living in an uncivilized country. Reminds me of a “zombie apocalypse”. Thank you liberals.
A discussion here a few days ago, among 70-80-year-olds, came to the same conclusion as Dr. Williams.
In almost every rural home, guns were commonplace, some hung on home-made racks above doorways, some were standing in corners of rooms, etc. Few were locked up and unavailable because they might be quickly needed to kill a predator animal threatening a child or entering a home. Sometimes, a farmer would come rushing through the door to grab a weapon to kill such an animal or predator.
Yet, with all that, few can remember a youth or child purposely using a weapon to harm or kill some other individual at home, or anywhere else.
The same can be said about knives. In rural areas, especially, just about every little boy and youth carried a pocket knife, but when disagreements flared, they led to fist fights--not cuts or shots.
Human nature was the same then, as now. Boys had fights over small and large disagreements, but they led to tussles or fist fights where some older person usually stopped or resolved.
What has changed?
Try pursuing this thought: when was the last time you heard a school official or adult explain to a child or young adult that one does not steal, or harm, or take something that belongs to another person--and give the reason as being the something called the Ten Commandments from God?
Never?
Then, that is probably because Liberals/Progressives, since the late 1800's have decreed that there can be no reference to God in the so-called "public square."
No God, no Ten Commandments, then, delivering a "request" to youth to not steal or kill can legitimately be backed up with only a "because I said so" response.
That response is not good enough to demand any seriousness, now is it?
in 1958, when I was in 7th grade, I brought a rifle (bolt action Winchester 22LR) to school 2 days each week. Tuesdays we had gun safety and Thursdays we had marksmanship. On any given day at least 10% of the students were carrying firearms. And nobody ever got hurt.
More Wisdom From Walter.
“I smell a hidden anti-gun agenda.”
Hidden? Hell it’s blatant!
I’m in your age range and you observe the past quite correctly. At this point in time I see the turning point as the defeat of Goldwater by Johnson in 1964. That was followed by way too much tolerance for anti-social and criminal behavior on a massive scale. Downhill ever since.
So true. I'm 60 years old and when I was in school the bad kids chewed gum and sometimes talked back to the teacher. The REALLY bad kids smoked in the bathroom. What a world we live in today...
In 1965-66 we would walk the halls of our high school in street clothes with our ROTC M-1s and no one paid any attention.
Of course there is an anti-gun agenda, but thank you for reminding us.
The breakdown of the two parent family unit has a significant effect on behavior of children and their development along the way. In the last few decades we have been rewarding single parent households through social welfare programs. 70% of black youths grow-up in single parent families today and that has had a terrible effect in the black community in my opinion. But children raised in broken and dysfunctional families of all races are effected. That wasn't nearly as common when we were growing up (I'm one of those 50 million over 65 also).
But the liberal/socialist desire to disarm America is a concerted effort apart from the disintegrating nuclear family. The violent acts of young people may be used by those who desire a dramatic change in our ability to defend our own personal freedom, but they would find another excuse to disarm and subjugate us regardless.
It is our duty as freedom loving Americans to push back when these gun grabbers come at us. They won't listen to reason because their cause is not legitimate at it's foundation. They are bereft of logic and there is no reasoning with most of them, so don't waste your time trying to persuade them. Stand firm on your God-given right, codified in our Constitution, to self defense against all enemies of liberty.
"From my cold dead hands."
This Ping List is for all things pertaining to the 2nd Amendment.
FReepmail me if you want to be added to or deleted from the list.
More 2nd Amendment related articles on FR's Bang List.
The advent of godlessness and piss poor parenting. Period.
When I was in high school in the mid-late 70’s, the school was open with doors unlocked until the custodians left around 10:00 pm. Come and go as you pleased.
And the thought of school security guards was unheard of.
Williams nails it, firearms have changed very little but many people are over the edge now.
Too many busy-bodies with their noses in other peoples’ business, with the retort: “Whadya need THAT for, anyway?!?”
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